Dear Over-Protective Parents,

There seems to be two categories of parents on Facebook, this letter will address the OverProtective ones.

Dear Over-Protective Parents,

Your child has moved into adolescence and you have finally decided to allow them to have a Facebook, one condition. Their profile picture can't be of themselves and their name on Facebook cant be their own. Okay this seems fair enough at face value, you don't want sex offenders knowing your child's name or face. But Facebook doesn't exactly advertise your child to sex offenders, if your child is under 18 no-one who is not a member of Facebook can see your child's profile and no member can see any detail about your child other than their name and image if they are a member. Why would that need to be a secret, walking down the street a friend of your child's could scream out their full name, and their face is visible also. School newsletters that are available for any member of the public to download (depending on school policy) often have photos and names, as well as the name of the school and sometimes even the year level. The real world is full of ways that the information that you try to keep private on Facebook, can easily be obtained. A friend of a friend on Facebook could even share photos and the full name of a user hiding under an alias. That brings me to the main point, Facebook friends. Do you trust your child to not scream out there address and phone number to strangers, did you not teach them stranger danger? Well the Internet is the same, teach them to not add strangers or people they don't trust. Teach them to not say anything on Facebook that they wouldn't want people to see in the real world, and teach them like you taught them in real life not to bully or be cruel to others (although Facebook is a private space, but like a whispered conversation in public there is always a chance someone can overhear). Learn about Facebook yourself, and teach your child to be responsible because ultimately they will grow old enough to make their own rules, and if they were just given a blanket rule and not taught judgment, they will ultimately be at more risk.

Bullying is not Okay

So I bet you just read that title and thought, well obviously, bullying is wrong.
But I wanted to post a little reminder, because I don't think that everyone gets something really important. Bullying happens for many reasons. I think there is a little misconception. That to bully, is to be unjustifiably mean. That if your a bully that no matter what the reasons you have for bulling can't be justified. And someone who bullies can't be empathised with by a normal rational person.
Well today I have learnt that this is not true. I don't want to bully the person who helped me learn this, and I don't want anyone to hate them. I want people to think about their own behaviours.
So there is this person in my school who is strange, has many issues and who can be quite abusive to people who have different views to themself. So they aren't the most popular person in the school. I have said mean things about her and I'm not going to deny that. But I was bullying, my cruel behaviour of gossiping behind her back, although mild, was bullying. But this person who helped me realise the complexity of bullying was saying to me today that their behaviour was justified due to the distress that this person had inflicted on others. I am learning that it is not the case, it is the opposite, this person who has caused distress to others is avoided; I do this myself as I don't enjoy being in their presence. I think this is fair although some may disagree. But I draw the line now, at myself and people around me (that outnumber them) abusing them. They are already avoided, because of their behaviours, I think this is fair as they can be hurtful. But abusing them as well, is too far. Bullying a mean abusive person is no fairer than abusing a kind soft spoken person. Everyone is human and spreading hate doesn't make the mean person any less mean it just makes the person abusing them feel better. I was guilty of being selfish in this way but then I thought about the impact is has that's positive, and there is none. It could even make the abusive person more abusive. I just wanted people to think about that for a bit.

Google Chrome Extentions - 5 Distractions

Everyone needs a bit of flair in their browsing, especially when working on that assignment or report that the teacher/boss wants on your desk by morning. So here are some extensions that are a bit of fun and a good distraction from whatever you are meant to be doing. Many of these extensions are links, but they are all available for download through the Chrome Web Store. This post has no traditional games, or extensions that run in the background while you browse, so prepare to be distracted!




KeyHero


Have you ever wondered how fast you really type? Well this extension is for you, it offers short touch typing tests in the classic format, but with short to medium length quotes. The aim is to type the quote as fast as you can and at the end it will show the budding typist their statistics including speed (wpm), accuracy and what the extension deems is the cause of most of your mistakes. Although a singular test does not take long it is just too easy to start another and another and another. Trying to beat your high score, its genius rests in its simplicity and its stats. Not many typing tests offer statistics like the ones that KeyHero does, and I have never seen such advanced ones offered for free. The simplicity of typing a short quote rather than a 2 page document and the lack of "lessons" although seemingly taking the value out of a typing focused extension gives this one its value. Practising your typing in little bursts rather than long sessions takes the chore out of it, especially compared to Mavis Beacon and Typershark type software. The downsides of KeyHero would have to be the lack of typing help to an extent it does offer some advice with a half page getting started and a myriad of user tips although. Also it looks a bit worn and could do with a bit of polishing and work to bring it up to the aesthetic level seen in higher end websites.


Strangely addictive, informative, powerful but needs some work to be brought into this decade




Colrd


Colrd is a nice little space for designers and colour lovers. One uses sliders, that include the classic red, green, blue and three additional sliders for luminosity, hue (a simpler way to get to roughly the right colour you want, especially if your not very good with rgb sliders) and saturation. This extension is a great way to catalogue colours, and also gradients and colour schemes. It's nice and simple and has good features such as viewing the colour fullscreen, without distraction. It also offers a grid of at least 100 similar colours to explore and a community of not just colours but also patterns, gradients and schemes. It is quite comparable to adobe's "Kuler" but the addition of patterns and without the flash layout (seemingly an adobe prerequisite) that I often find glitchy and slow. This is a nice little mindless toy to fiddle with but it also a community and powerful design tool


Clear, simple, practical and sleek but could use optional CMYK sliders




BeatLab



I kinda don't like BeatLab, there is nothing wrong with it. It's sleek and it brings me back to the days many a year ago when I wanted to make music, particularly using looping software. That's what beatlab is really, a nice clear simple layout for looping online. The thing that was annoying me mostly is there is no real help through the site to get you making something more interesting than anything you would make with a average sense of musical style and a (musical) keyboard. I sat fiddling for an hour and everything I made sounded terrible. It was as fruitless as my experiments with fruityloops and about as difficult. With BeatLab's claim of ease I felt cheated. I may come back to it but I didn't really like it. Ignoring that though, one can easily waste a lot of time, it does have a lot of variety in samples and is quite powerful. Best of all it comes at the low low price of free.


complex, powerful for something web based and definitely not simple but at least it looks good




TweetDeck



TweetDeck has to be my favourite social tool, its desktop version is my favourite social dashboard of all time, and the Chrome extension has some nice features. TweetDeck is marketed as Twitter for professionals. The extension is nowhere near as polished as the Desktop Client but it is still my extension of choice for social networking; it really does have the same charm. One can link their facebook and twitter accounts (and others like foursquare). Post from facebook fan pages, your regular facebook, and twitter accounts or a combination of the above listed. It also has a nice system of displaying information, like seesmic, hootsuite and many others, it organizes information into columns. In the simplest practical form it has three columns, one for everyone you follow on twitter and your friends and likes on facebook, your direct message inbox and another for every public tweet that directly relates to you and your facebook notifications. One can add extra columns for trending topics, other social networks or twitter lists. One can set little pings and popups for tweets and other notifications creating the ultimate distraction. I find it annoying that you have to click a button to open a little window to type your status, and then you must click "tweet". Also you cannot reply to facebook messages within TweetDeck, instead you have to open facebook, and it doesn't even offer a link to do so.


nice, easy to use, perfect distraction but some things feel like they were designed to make life harder


a Google a Day



a Google a Day is yet another website with an extension in the form of a link, but that seems to be 80% of all chrome extensions anyway. Google a day increases your googling skills, by giving you a question and you have to use Google to find the answer as quickly as possible. It's a formula that's hard to mess up, the layout is neat and very "Google-like". Beware of using Google a day if you have slow internet as both the timer does not seem to stop during loading and because it becomes really frustrating when your trying to get in the mindset of speed googling. I don't think there are any flaws with this extension per say, but I think there are things that really could be done to make it better, for example a version for children, or a mode where educators can enter questions and send the set to their students as homework. As is it is a neat little distraction.


Neat and simple but has so much wasted potential.


What are your favourite distracting extensions for chrome? Join the discussion on twitter, facebook and the comments bellow :)

okay, reviews

I love Google, I love Chrome, I love Android and I love games.

So welcome to the violet room's review season.

Over the rest of the summer break, I will be focusing on reviews, protip's and recommendations here in the violet room and in some cases on my youtube channel

I'm also thinking of making a new youtube channel for these types of videos as a lot of the stuff on my current channel is pretty sucky. I will post links if I do so.

If you want to make sure you don't miss any posts, you can follow this blog or alternatively you can like the h0110wPeTaL facebook page or follow me on twitter (links in the sidebar)

At the moment I shall be in the middle of a lot of frantic posting, video making and tee shirt designing. This will last as long as I can keep up the pace, but this is unlikely to continue after the start of febuary.

Please make recommendations for anything you would like to hear another opinion on.

Thanks for your continued support,
Hollow

progressive IP over protect IP

It's not often that I am proud of my country. The governments views on technology and related new media and then the legislation that either must be put in place for the protection of users or in other situations where The legalization is either put or kept in place for reasons or almost reasons unknown *cough* r18 *cough*.

Many of the progressive movements and think tanks about technology occur away from Australia and concern mostly Europe's and America's Internet space, but because so many servers are hosted in Europe and America, so many superpower online companies and organizations call it home. Although this is both understandable and discussions about the big ICT issues will be more effective than talks here, but Australia really should step up more often and discuss the issues and how they effect us as a nation, but it seems as if the reverse is happening, okay, that maybe an exaggeration, but certainly in high school education ICT is being neglected, I can only speak of my state, but I bet that the others are not much better.
The Internet is like a new world, with its own rules and language, every person in Australia will have some form of contact with it and yet its presumes that young people because they have grown up with it, will instantly understand the ins and outs, because they understand OMG, FML and LOL. That they are safe from online attack, or that this online attack is not as dangerous as being attacked in the offline world. Or the reverse, that young people should not be allowed online because no matter how much they are educated the Internet is still not safe for them. Young people are not being educated of the risks in practical ways.

I digress, today I am proud.

The five major ISPs have teamed up to trial a system to help stamp out Internet piracy without infringing on our rights like protect IP does. This is an amazing step. It does have a really long way to go before we see the impacts of this or even if it will be effective at all. There is no promise that this will even leave the trial stages, but its like the ISPs have seemingly taken many of the counter comments used regarding sopa and protect ip and built a model based on that and I am amazed. This is world changing stuff, more than the carbon tax or anything the Australian government has legislated in recent years, hopefully this will show the middle ground where the user gets a voice and the massive copyright holders don’t own the Internet.

Skyrim

Okay, everyone who knows me knows that I have been a TES fan girl since Oblivion, this was also about the time I really started getting into gaming. Obviously this dates me (as not gaming for very long at all) but nonetheless I have been actively waiting for Skyrim since its working name was released in 2008.
I think shall start with an anecdote or three, I pretty much told my mother that when TES:V was released (2010 was the scheduled release) that I would not be attending school that day; attend school, I did not. I bought about $50-$60aud of chips, confectionery, (glo juice obviously) and energy drink, dashed into my game retailer and twitched nervously as I waited for my copy, that due to what is becoming a common occurrence in australia, the game was put on sale a day early. I was freaking out frantically texting and calling my boyfriend while trying to post updates to twitter and facebook. I put in the disc, while rambling incoherently on the phone, steam popped up, I typed in the serial... BOOM cannot install game has not been released, so I went a bit nutty.
I spent the next several hours reading the strategy guide and pacing. Midnight came along, so I set-up my install and gazed and my screen, watching Harry Partridge‘s Skyrim video. I was ready to play after a 20min wait and then... updates and patches, AN HOUR OF THEM.
By the time that was all done, I was a little bit annoyed, It was 0130 and I just wanted to play the fragging game. I found out later that this was even worse for my cousins in in our wild west, Perth who are 3hrs behind us, the game releases at midnight Australian eastern time though.
Okay, so here is the actual review, I just wanted to give that to show the excitement and irritation I entered the game with.

So I open the game, and started construction my character, that’s when alarm bells started ringing. It was hard to move the little sliders to alter my appearance and I wasn't really sure what menu contained what particular aspect of appearance. I just had to kind of go with it and hope everything worked out. Eventually I discovered that it was easier to use the keyboard for the creation process. I have to admit that I was slightly awed by the opening, but nowhere near as much as with oblivion, I have watched that cutscence at least a couple of dozen times and it still gives me shivers. Skyrim didn’t have that epic RPG vastness shown in its opening, no big shots of the evil that awaits or the world that we will spend hours grinding through, great for realism but RPGs suit having a little bit of a teaser, a little bit of prophesy.
I got through the creation and intro, still a little bit confused but generally okay. I meandered through the introduction, bla bla execution, bla bla dragons. I just wanted to get into some real gameplay!
so I got out into the real world an took a look around, my first though was how ugly it is, not in a poorly designed way, but in a snow, rocks, dirt, and cloud way. I pretty much accepted though that I wasn’t going to aesthetically like skyrim that much, as I was never a big fan of northern Cyrodiil (Cyrodiil is the country that oblivion was set in, the northern border shares the southern border of skyrim, it shares much of skyrim’s climate) so I opened my menu and looked for the map, easy to find with the 4 point compass style menu. I look at it, and was like “what?!” I was utterly confused, was it tilted, where were the edges of the map, what was going on here! I did notice a marked village though so I sauntered off in that direction. Also in regard to the map in a later quest; I don’t particularly have a knack with mountains, especially in games, but my job was to climb one, so I walked around part of it, and I could not find an way up. So I passed out on the lounge room floor with the strategy guide and a blankey (about 6am) and woke up at about midday. Eventually after looking in the strategy guide some more, I found that the path was on the other side of a mountain near a village, perhaps the dude who told me to climb the mountain said that, but I didn’t hear, or was too thick to understand, so now I had to work out a way to get there. I looked at my map, all I could see was cloud, and the hint of a river. I looked up the village on my strategy guide map, I squinted my eyes and managed to see a river and a road that seemed far far away, I looked at the “ye old” preorder map (it looks more like the oblivion map), and I had no idea where I was. so I gave up on that and I wandered down the river and eventually got to my destination. I understand the map now mostly. I realised though that map problem was a more obvious feature of what I now realise was me having no idea how the menu system worked, It felt like an arrogant, “if you don’t get this you suck” or a “this is our game, you should just work it out cause we don't have time to make a tutorial”
Okay, fine, I’m stupid, I get that but that’s no excuse for not having some form of tutorial when you make a menu system that is not like most other menus (I did read the booklet, that didn’t help me much) It made the first few, already sleep deprived hours of gameplay difficult and the world felt nowhere near as open as oblivion did (I was only confident in changing quests about 6hrs in)
and the booklet doesn't count, I read the booklet and it does not replace a proper tutorial.
It felt like a new game in a long series that had menus that were always structured in that way, and that I should go back and play them or do some more research about the past games. It felt as if you had to be one of “them” to understand it. Okay, I am a bit slow, I can let it slide but this really took away from how I expected the first few hours to pan out. I planned to play non stop for at least 24hrs,
I do have some massive praise for the game as well.The dungeons, I hated oblivion dungeons, they felt claustrophobic and I always got lost, walking around in circles, skyrim dungeons are more straight forward and vast and it makes it easier to focus on your objectives and combat, but they are also not so simple that its impossible to get lost, I have to check the map every now and then, but its not a constant concern.
Also the combat is awesome, oblivion really messed up the leveled combat, you could predict the leveling up of enemies and the game was either too easy or too hard. The advances in skyrim are perfect, I’m almost level 10 after about 12 hrs of gameplay, and I have encountered 3 or 4 frost trolls, every time I have either died or run away, I’m just no match, maybe as I build my perks (think borderlands, and if you don't know what I mean, and don't mind me rambling on, chk this) and skills I will be able to beat it, but I cant just level up and beat him on raw power as a level 10 and I doubt as even a level 20 or 30.
Also the magic is amazing, I was always put off from being a battlemage because casting was slow, drained lots of magika and was weak, and looked terrible. The lower level magic that I’m using is pretty weak but its fast, pretty and satisfying. It hold the promise of leveling up to become something awesome, and when it is a bit of a fail you can always equip a one handed weapon to supplement it.
The menu system when you do finally work out how the frag it works, is pretty good, I love how the little meaningless quests are filed into there own out of the way category, although I must say whoever picked the font, you couldn’t have picked something less related if you tried, you could at least weathered it a bit. It’s one of the cleanest sans serif fonts I have seen. nice to read but so strange in a “ye old” style game. also the disappearance of the character preview. sure I can exit the menu, toggle to third person and look at myself. But in oblivion I could drop things and kick them around to see the details. and yet you (and I'm happy you did) implement a better way at of looking at items.
It seems that fashion has been abandoned, if anyone in the production spent 10 minutes on the tesnexus (one of the largest mod bases for oblivion and morrowind) one would observe that some of the most downloaded and famous mods improve magic, midas magic; combat, deadly reflex; overall character presentation, beautiful people. and those were all accounted for in skyrim, but not the NUMEROUS better armour mods, everything from the original, albeit revealing, hentai magic collection, to all the modifications of the current armour to make it look better. Some of the most requested items on skyrim forums were cloaks and better looking clothing/armour, and the same is the case with weapons. It seems, both from observing npcs, and shops, that the clothing is uglier than ever. War is no excuse for this, people always want the prettiest and most powerful items, no matter the cost. I hope there is going to be a dlc improving this, the shivering isle expansion for oblivion has some of the best clothing and weapons. I bet many people haven't been vocal about this yet, because clothing is one of the things that you worry about once you have finished the game and settled down, you something you then take pleasure from. It takes away from the role playing for some character types, if the prettiest thing you can wear is your underwear.
Also some of the little things that have been added to evoke a sense of reality, such as being able to cut wood. Seemed a little hurried and as if they were added last minute, They seem to lack purpose.
There are some things I liked about oblivion better. In oblivion you can jump off just about everything, sure you would die, but it gave you the freedom to do as you pleased. Also I miss not carrying items to perform alchemy. Alchemy was one of my core skills in oblivion, I mastered it on more than one occasion (gained the maximum skill) and it is nowhere near as accessible as it was and that is a bit sad.

Overall: this is without a doubt the best elder scrolls game I have played, It lives up to the hype and it was worth ever cent and compared to the gameplay hours I expect to gain, it did not cost many cents. I think I will echo what other reviews are saying and go with 9-9.5 out of 10.

Offline... for one day

um its really late... and im a little retarded so i have a series of memes from memebase for you to interpreted why... after this post... i have gone ofline (it took an hour)

Gaming Season

Gamers everywhere are preparing for a long couple of months, with a large quantity of major sequels coming out within a month of each other, in many cases within the space of a few days. Obviously the main game for me will be skyrim, and it seems that each gamer has a game of preference this gaming season. With modern warfare 3 (the new call of duty game)due out in 13 days (8 nov)

accompanied with yet again another frenzy of official drinks, I have seen the mountain dew promotion, (not in Australia). also I think I saw v or monster with mw3 emblazoned on it a couple of weeks ago at the supermarket.

battlefield 3 has been in public beta for a while now, and officially came out three days ago on the 25th. It is classed as the more realistic version of call of duty, although the gameplay is slower than cod games, it has a very strong following. Cod is like twilight for boys, easy to digest and strangely addictive and satisfying. Both cod and battlefield are games that I really need to get around to trying, i'm sick of the look of joy on a guys face when I say I'm a gamer, and then the disappointment when I admit to not playing cod although has been on my todo list for ages and bf3 too.



assassins creed: revelations (4) is due out on the 15th of nov. I must say its the only game on this list I have no desire to play, or even observe someone playing. I played one of the ac games on ds. I thoroughly enjoyed it, albeit the purists stated the obvious fact, that it is nothing like the pc/xbox versions. So I managed to swindle a copy of ac2, after being advised that the first game was rubbish and it was not worth my time, but the second was. I stuck with it for about half an hour perhaps an hour before getting stuck in the prequel/tut/whatever stage. Th controls were a mystery to me, and my preferred genre of game has always been fps, and above that, rpgfps (borderlands, fallout, oblivion). I have a dislike of third person games as a general rule (exceptions being just cause, I admit I did not put many hours in and harry potter and the chamber of secrets.)could not stand neverwinter nights, or playing morrowind or oblivion in third person during combat. ac2 did not make the grade, after getting stuck on the controls, the lack of control I had in the story of game and just it not really dragging me in meant that I never really went to the effort of playing it further. But I do not doubt its a great game, but everyone has personal taste obviously, be it in books, movies, TV or games.

have to admit one of the best trailers I have seen this year... perhaps ever



Okay best til last, skyrim. For those who do not know oblivion is one of the first games I played ever (thank you phleabytes and I guess bdm22 as well... a little) and skyrim is its much anticipated sequel. I'm not gonna lie, this game makes me do strange things, and even just the thought of it causes this strange response that includes nostalgia and a fair amount of this



and, my skyrim strategy notebook... um that may or may not have my name on the front in the dragon language... and I may or may not have spent 2 days spray painting it...

there are 13 strangely foreboding days (what if the game is terrible, cant I keep this feeling of excitement forever?) until the game comes out, it is a friday, also remembrance day and a strange metaphysical whatever according to this



I could go on for oblivion and skyrim for ages, and I may, but in a later post just before I get off the net and start playing the game

Occupy Melbourne

I am sick of the Occupy Melbourne exaggerations of police brutality and and needless measures, in the most part regarding the destruction of property and the removal of protesters, anyone who did not expect the protesters to be removed by force after the comments (ie eviction notice) of the Melbourne city council, are naive to say the least. Those who resist, who are surprised that police are dragging them away, and defending themselves from resisting protesters are also a tad slow. I am not against socialist ideals, nor protesting, but this just seems to be the whining of upper middle class Australians, if you want to help the impoverished, got spend the time you have been protesting helping at a homeless shelter or donating money. Not feigning and whinging about inequality, actions may speak louder than words, but it seems that your actions are nothing more than shouting your words. All this is seeming to achieve is back patting among supporters of your cause and alienation against those who do no believe or do not agree with your childish antics.

socially making the most of the internet

Im not sure what to name this post, but what it is about is socially making the most of the internet, so I guess I will call it that.
One of my brothers was surprised to say the least that considering I have spent less than 6 months really actively on the internet and social media, so I thought I would write about what one should do to make connections with like minded individuals and geniuses on the internet.
The first thing I can think of is to pick a social internet circle and stick with it, I include YouTube in the definition of social internet, as it is most definitely a way to interact socially with others if you so decide. And in ways I exclude the vanilla usage of facebook, as you can use facebook to interact with new people but it is really for reinforcing relationships. Hence I use the term Social Internet rather than Social Network.
Charlie McDonnell is a prime example of how he made YouTube work for him, Although a self admitting nerd and once a shy quiet lad, he is now a musical a YouTube sensation. Who can say the line that many people wish they could, that being "my job is YouTube" Charlie has explained his rise to fame and his thoughts on fame most aptly in this video

and the idea of doing what you do, for you; I think is completely true. I'll be lucky if three people read this, I don't do much on-line to get the attention of others I do it for me.

I use twitter, because writing is my medium of choice although it does not have the same viral nature as YouTube, as tweets are not really passed on outside of twitter and even if they are the don't really go viral, unless its a drunk/high celeb. But through twitter I have a small yet solid base of friends and followers from all over the world. something that is scary.

I did this through constantly being active and joining in conversations with others, an essential trait in the offline social world not surprisingly is essential in the online world too

(sorry that this post is a bit messy)